Parallelogram Omnibus Edition

by Brande, Robin

  I sat there and took some deep breaths. I adjusted the eyeshade, but that made me aware of all the wires, and so then I had to breathe some more.

  I wondered what time it was. I forgot to ask. Maybe Halli was already waiting. Maybe I was late.

  Breathe, I told myself. Relax. Think of Daniel—don’t you want to see him?

  And in that quiet, strange room, I finally started to relax. And it’s a credit to Halli’s own powers of concentration that she was able to push through whatever blocks I had, because it wasn’t long at all before I felt her tug on my sleeve.

  “Heya,” she said, “let’s go eat.”

  55

  Thirty minutes isn’t a lot of time. Barely enough to greet your friends, grab a bowl of stew, sit down at a table and huddle together for warmth.

  Certainly not enough time to sneak off with your parallel universe boyfriend and get in some meaningful private time.

  “Now where have you been keeping all that?” Sarah asked me once we’d sat down across from each other. The sun was just going down, so there was still enough light to eat by.

  “Keeping all of what?” I asked.

  “Those clothes!” she said. “Very smart. Holding something in reserve for the end. All of my clothes look like I’ve been rolling in the dirt for days.”

  “And yet you still smell like a florist’s,” Martin said.

  “I do have my standards,” she answered.

  Their brief moment of banter gave me time to come up with an answer. “I traded it,” I said. “I met a woman yesterday who said she loved my coat, and I loved hers, so—trade.”

  Daniel bumped me with his thigh.

  “But what about—” Sarah took a slurp of her stew and pointed with her spoon to her own neckline.

  I looked down. Part of my new sweatshirt was peeking out of the coat. Jeez, that girl was observant.

  “She gave me this, too,” I said. I wondered if that was enough of an explanation, but I shouldn’t have worried—Sarah was already on to her next topic.

  “It’s so nice you can finally eat with us,” she said. “Although I’ve been telling everyone how deeply I admire your discipline.”

  “My discipline?”

  This time it was Halli’s turn to bump me with her leg. It was good I was sandwiched between the only two people who knew the truth about me, although I couldn’t figure out what Halli’s signal meant.

  “Yes,” Sarah said. “Your meditation practice. I could never forego supper, for one thing, nor could I sit for hours and hours as you do every night. My mum is always trying to get me to do something like that—”

  I suddenly became aware of the time.

  I bolted up off of the bench.

  “I have to go,” I said. “I’ll be back, but right now I have to go.”

  There was no time for a better explanation. I took off at a run. It was stupid of me to settle in like that. Professor Whitfield would be sounding the 30-minute signal at any moment.

  I was afraid I wouldn’t have time to make it all the way to the hermit’s hut, so instead I ran left and ducked into some trees. My heart was racing—I’d been so careless. I wasn’t used to such short visits. It was so stupid of me.

  Within less than a minute after I’d found cover, I heard the soft-sounding gong. That was the noise Professor Whitfield and I had agreed on: not as jarring as an alarm clock, but still a sound that would summon me back.

  And back I went, into the white-walled room.

  I’d left my eyeshade back at the hermit’s hut, so right away the lights were in my eyes. All of the sticky patches were on the seat beneath me—they’d been ripped off when I left for the Alps.

  The door opened, and I saw Professor Whitfield and Albert. Albert was grinning.

  “Want to take a look?” the professor asked.

  “At what?” I said.

  “Something very unusual.”

  56

  Albert took his seat in front of a bank of computer monitors in the observation room. There were about a dozen other people in there. They parted for me like a celebrity.

  Some of them clapped, a few of them patted me on the shoulder. I was beginning to get a feeling for how it is to be Halli Markham. I could see why she doesn’t always look so thrilled when strangers shout out her name.

  “Can we clear the room for a while?” Professor Whitfield said to everyone, for which I was grateful. Soon it was just him and me and Albert.

  The area was about three times as big as the little sound-proof room I’d just been in. This place had computers and video monitors and other sorts of equipment lining all the walls. Albert sat at the wide, U-shaped desk and typed speedily on the keyboard.

  “There,” Albert said, pointing at the screen. The professor and I leaned in to look.

  It was a colorful, blobbish-looking form, set against a dark background.

  Professor Whitfield traced his finger along the top of it, where the colors alternated lavender and yellow. “Recognize her?” he asked.

  I leaned closer and stared. There were no other features on the screen—no furniture or anything else to place the form in space—but yes, after a few seconds staring, I did recognize her.

  “Is that me?” I asked.

  “It is,” the professor said. “The wave form of you. That theory of yours was correct.”

  “It was?”

  “Look here,” the professor said, pointing to the blob on the screen. “I think this answers how it is you can still receive sensory information back in your room while your body is in Halli’s universe. Vapor trail, signature trail—whatever you want to call it, you clearly leave an imprint. Like a placeholder for your body to follow back.”

  I stared at the form again. “So I’m gone by then? I’m already over in Halli’s universe?”

  “Gone,” Albert confirmed. “You left about five minutes before.”

  “Did it always stay the same?” I asked. “I mean, the colors and everything?”

  “No, those fluctuated,” Professor Whitfield answered. “Albert, see if you can speed it up.”

  The three of us watched the form I’d left behind morph from lavender and yellow to red and blue, and toward the end a little green and white thrown in.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” the professor answered. To Albert he said, “Now can you pull up the overlay?”

  Albert struck a few more keys, and a new set of colors emerged. A lot more reds and dark purples. You could see a hazy sort of outline, one form against the other, with the yellows in particular from the first form really standing out against the purple of the second.

  “Can you give us borders?” Professor Whitfield asked. Albert traced out two separate forms, one directly in front of, and a little lower than, the other.

  It was the tracing that did it. I backed away from the screen. Then I leaned forward again, just to make sure. It gave me chills. I didn’t know what to think.

  Professor Whitfield had been watching my reaction. “You know, don’t you?” he asked.

  I nodded. My mouth felt dry. I almost wasn’t ready to accept it. “It’s Halli,” I managed to say. “She’s there with me. Somehow her form is there, too—a little bit taller, broader shoulders—that’s her. But . . . I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t a hundred percent, either,” Professor Whitfield admitted. He looked at me. “Any thoughts?”

  I was pacing back and forth now, trying to sort it out.

  “What made you say it’s a wave form?” I asked.

  “We picked it up on a spectrograph,” Albert answered. “It separates out wave frequencies.”

  “What are the colors?” I asked. “How did you get those?”

  “They’re from infrared sensors,” Albert answered.

  “So there was definitely something in the room,” I said. “Two things. Was Halli’s there the whole time?”

  “Yes,” Albert said. He clicked the keyboard again. “You ca
n see here where both of your signatures show up simultaneously—right after you left.”

  “So what does that mean?” I said again, but the professor didn’t answer. He just waited and watched me pace.

  Finally the light went on in my head. I stopped pacing and looked the professor in the eye. And then I smiled, and he smiled, too. He gave me a nod. “Let’s hear it.”

  57

  “We’re entangled,” I said. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “I think so,” Professor Whitfield said. “At least, that was my guess.”

  Quantum entanglement. I’ve read about it, but this was my first time seeing it—if that’s what was really going on. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” He never believed it could really happen. Quantum physicists have shown it does.

  It’s like this: say you have a calcium atom that emits two photons—which are particles of light—at the same time. Both of these photons are exactly the same—they have the same spin, the same velocity, everything.

  Now let’s say you separate those two photons into two totally different locations. Maybe one stays in Bear Creek, and the other travels miles away.

  What quantum entanglement says is that even if the photons are separated and can’t communicate with each other in any way, they’re still connected somehow—they still sort of feel what’s happening to the other one.

  And that’s where the observer problem comes back into play.

  Because what Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle says is that any time you measure a particle, you’re affecting it. If you measure its spin angle, then you interfere with its velocity. If you measure the velocity, you affect the spin. That’s why it’s uncertain—you can never know all of the properties of a particle at the same time.

  With quantum entanglement, it gets even weirder. Because when you measure the spin or velocity of one of the twin particles, the other one will change to match. Even though there’s no way the two particles can communicate. That’s why it’s “spooky action at a distance.”

  And that’s why Einstein hated the theory so much. Because according to his Special Theory of Relativity, nothing is faster than the speed of light. And therefore nothing should be able to communicate at a rate faster than the speed of light. But somehow the separated photons are able to communicate with each other instantaneously, even though there’s no way a signal could reach one or the other that fast. It violates everything Einstein believed in.

  Quantum physics is like that. People either hate it or they love it.

  “So you really think that’s what this is?” I asked Professor Whitfield. “You think Halli and I are somehow entangled?”

  “It’s my hypothesis for now,” he said. “Ready to test it out?”

  58

  It had been an hour since I’d abruptly left the dinner table. I had no idea whether Halli was still waiting for me somewhere, but we were about to see if that mattered.

  Professor Whitfield sat across from me in the sound-proof room. Albert and whoever else might be watching were next door in the observation room.

  “Describe to me how it feels,” the professor said.

  I closed my eyes and tried to reconstruct every single moment of what it feels like to go over to Halli’s world.

  “Okay. So first I have to be really relaxed. A lot of times I’ll get a song stuck in my head, so I have to wait until I get rid of that. Then maybe I’ll think of some phrase that came to me earlier, or something someone said to me during the day, and I have to get rid of that, too. Basically I have to get in there and vacuum out my head.” I opened my eyes. “That’s why the meditation CD was so good for me.”

  “But you haven’t needed that for a while,” Professor Whitfield said.

  “No, not since Halli brought me over there when I was sleeping. Ever since then we seem to be able to connect a lot faster and a lot more easily.”

  “So what does it feel like?” Professor Whitfield asked. “When you connect?”

  I closed my eyes again. “It’s like a . . . tug, I guess. Like there’s this soft little tug . . .”

  “Where do you feel it?” he asked.

  I felt around the top of my head with my hand. “I think it’s up here, but maybe it’s lower down, like on my shoulder—” I opened my eyes. “I’m sorry I can’t pinpoint it—it’s just . . . weird.”

  “Take your time.”

  I groaned and shut my eyes again. “Okay, so there’s this tug—”

  “Moving you to the right or the left? Or up?”

  I swayed my body to test it. “Right. Definitely right. And then a little up.”

  We went back and forth like that a little while longer, until Professor Whitfield thought I’d given him enough information. And then he made a suggestion.

  “This time,” he said, “instead of being tugged, I want you to push. Think about that same body movement, the same sensations, but instead of being pulled there, push yourself.”

  “To where?” I asked. “Like to where Halli and I usually meet?”

  “Put a destination in your mind,” Professor Whitfield said. “Picture it very strongly. And try saying to yourself in a loud, internal voice, ‘Go to—’ and then name your spot.”

  “You think that will work?” I asked.

  “If it doesn’t we’ll try something else. This is experimentation, Audie. We don’t have to get it right the first time, or even the twentieth.”

  That was a relief. Although I felt the pressure of a dozen or more pairs of eyes in that observation room next door, watching my every move.

  I tried to put them out of my head.

  “I’m going to leave now,” Professor Whitfield said. “Do you want the blindfold?”

  “No, I’m fine. But I’m going to try it really fast, as soon as you go. So . . .” I peeked open one eye. “Go.”

  He shut the door softly behind him. I shut my eyes tightly and took a few deep breaths. Then I shouted loudly in my head, “TO THE HERMIT’S HUT!”

  The sensation was different. But there definitely was a sensation. A sort of slipping off to the right and up, and then a new sensation after that. Coupled with a sound.

  “Oof.”

  “Oh, sorry!” I said.

  “Don’t be,” Daniel said. I’d landed halfway on top of him, halfway off. And as I scrambled to take the spot next to him, he pulled me closer instead.

  “Where’s Halli?” I whispered.

  “She’ll be right back,” he answered. “So we shouldn’t waste any time.”

  59

  “So you don’t need me?” Halli asked as soon as she returned. She’d gone off to bring back a few blankets. The night was very cold.

  “I guess not,” I said, very excited by the prospect. That might have had something to do with the fact that I’d just had five minutes alone to make out with my intergalactic boyfriend. Who was leaving in the morning. Although I tried not to think too much about that.

  Even with Halli back, Daniel and I could sit side by side huddling for warmth and holding hands beneath the blanket. It sort of cracked me up—how back in the observation room at the lab, no one had a clue what was going on. They were watching an empty room, or at best, a colored blob of me on the monitor. No one would guess that what I was really doing was sitting here holding hands with a hot young Englishman.

  “So what does that mean?” Halli asked. “To us?”

  “I think it means it frees us both up,” I said. “We don’t have to schedule specific times to meet. As long as I know where you are, I can direct myself there and find you.”

  “But do you even need to know that much?” Daniel asked. I’d briefly explained the physics to both of them.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “If you truly are entangled, the way you described, perhaps you have a sense of Halli in the universe, no matter where she is. You won’t have to name a destination, beyond something like, ‘Find Halli.’”

  It was an interesting idea. One I
’d be sure to share with the professor.

  “My time is probably almost up,” I said. I’d asked the professor for forty-five minutes this time, which he reluctantly gave me. “We have a lot of work to do,” he’d said. “Please,” I’d said, “just a little bit more.”

  I squeezed Daniel’s hand. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to come back again before you all go to bed tonight. It might not be until the morning.”

  “Try to make it early,” Halli said. “These guys have a long hike down to the lake tomorrow. They’re going to need to catch the boat.”

  “Halli,” Daniel said, “do you mind if we . . . just a few minutes alone, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Subtle, Daniel,” she said with a chuckle, but she rose to her feet anyway. “See you tomorrow, Aud.”

  That was Will’s nickname for me. Strange to hear it for the first time coming from her. But I liked it—a lot.

  Still, it felt a little weird, thinking about Will all of a sudden . . .

  Although not so weird that I resisted the lips that came to mine. We pulled the blanket tighter and kept each other warm.

  “Daniel,” I said. “Tomorrow . . .”

  “I know,” he answered.

  “What . . . I mean, do you think we’ll ever . . . see each other again?”

  “I don’t know,” he told me. “I hope so. One of the reasons I’m so interested in your physics lessons is I’m hoping to work that out. It doesn’t seem right that this would be the end.”

  I sighed and leaned into him. “Although I probably shouldn’t tell you this . . .”

  “And now you must,” he said.

  I hesitated a moment more, then decided I might as well. “I am going to be seeing you, in a few weeks.”

  “When? Why didn’t you tell me? Where shall I meet you?”

  “No, sorry,” I said. “It’s not you you, it’s another you. The you in my world.”

  Daniel sagged back against the wall. “I see.”

  “So it’s obviously not the same,” I said, “but at least I’ll get to look at you.”